Mortal Fear (7 page)

But they made out okay. Annie even managed to pay Miless way through private school until she realized that the school would pay to have him. Because Miles Turner was a genius. I say that because, though I did well in school without much effort, Miles did not try
at all
. In the ninth grade he could answer reading problems in algebra after scanning them once. He never put anything on paper. After we all took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, some army major from Washington telephoned down to the school, talked to the principal, and asked to speak to Miles. He said something about Miles having a home in the army just as soon as he came of age. Miles told the major he wouldnt join the army unless Russian paratroopers landed in his mothers yard. The major said that might not be such a remote possibility. He also told Miles that Greenville was a confirmed Russian nuclear target because of its bridge over the Mississippi River. Miles said if the Russians wanted to nuke Greenville, he might consider joining the army after all. The Russian army.

Okay, he was a smart-ass. But that doesnt make him a killer. He was just born in the wrong town. And he knew it. We both graduated high school as National Merit scholars, and could have gone to college anywhere in the United States for next to nothing. But there our paths diverged. I was so into girls that summer that I hardly gave college a thought, and since my parents were having
their own problems at the timefinancial and maritalthey ignored the issue as well. Id always done well in school, thus I always would. In the end I went to Ole Miss sight unseen, and because I had waited so long to decide, my father even had to pay for the privilege.

Miles applied for and was awarded a full academic scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While I farted around Oxford, Mississippi, with scatterbrained, Venus-shaped sorority girls and drunken Young Republicans, Miles Turner was fanatically programming, tearing apart, and rebuilding big clumsy metal boxes that I would not even have recognized in 1978.

Computers.

It seems natural now, but at the time it was odd. He spoke the language of bits and drives and floating memory at a time when those words were as foreign to the general public as Attic Greek. The really odd thing is that Miles thinks Im smarter than he is. I have no idea why. This is not false modesty. I will frankly admit that I have above-average intelligence, just as I will admit I have a poor sense of direction. I can look at a problem, analyze itfor patterns, usuallyand given enough time, solve it. Miles doesnt analyze anything. He looks at something, and he
just knows
. He grasps physics and numbers the way I do people and musicwholly by intuition. Its as though his asocial childhood allowed him to tune into some subrational channel of information that is beyond the rest of us.

When I took the sysop job, I was looking forward to getting to know him again. Id only seen him a handful of times in the past fifteen years. But for whatever reason, it hasnt worked out that way. We occasionally exchange e-mailsometimes using the satellite video link that his techs installed here when I took the job-slash-hobbybut on balance, I know him no better now than I did when we were kids. Maybe my hopes were misplaced. Maybe you can never know anyone more deeply than you know them in childhood.

By the time Drewe arrives, Ive put together a bastardized stir-fry of broccoli and pork and lemon. We eat it
on the front porch, which is thick with heat despite the falling darkness, but mercifully free of mosquitoes. As soon as we sit, Drewe asks for a play-by-play of the meeting in New Orleans. I give it to her, glad not to have to keep anything back. She takes in every word with the machinelike precision that carried her through medical school with honors, and when I am done she says nothing. I have held one detail until the end, hoping for a silence like this one.

Whats the pineal gland? I ask.

She finds my eyes in the gloom. The pineal body?

I guess, yeah.

Its a small glandular structure at the core of the brain. In the third ventricle, I think. Its about the size of a pea.

What does it do?

Until about thirty years ago, nobody thought it did anything. It was considered a vestigial organ, like the appendix. Scientists knew the pineal made melatonin, but no one knew what melatonin did. What does the pineal have to do with anything?

The FBI says the killer cut off Karin Wheats head to get to her pineal gland.

What?

Sick, huh? The other victims might be missing theirs too, or else their whole heads.

Drewe grimaces.

Can you think of any reason why someone would want pineal glands? Do they have any medical use?

I dont think so. There were some pineal experiments going on at Tulane when I was there, related to breast cancer, I think. But I dont remember what the findings were. She pauses. You can buy melatonin in health food stores, though. God, this reminds me of those PBS shows where they talk about Oriental medicine. You know, how Japanese men pay poachers hundreds of thousands of dollars for rhinoceros horns and tiger testicles and things. All to cure impotence or restore their lost youth or something.

My opinion of my wifes mental acuity has been reaffirmed yet again. She has already broached a theory that
seems more logical than that of the police in California, who believe the EROS murders may be the work of a cult.

So what
is
melatonin? I ask. What does it do?

Its a hormone that regulates your sleep cycle. Your circadian rhythms. You know, what causes jet lag. Some people take it to prevent or relieve jet lag symptoms.

Can you remember anything else about it?

Drewe touches her forefinger to the tip of her nose and fixes her gaze somewhere out in the darkness. I know this posture well: concentration mode. I think it controls the release of serotonin, maybe some other hormones. I seem to recall something from one of the journals. Neurobiological stuff. Something to do with the pineal and the aging process. Weird how that fits with the Oriental thing, isnt it? But that doesnt mean anything. Murderers dont read
JAMA
or
Journal of Neuroscience
.

Why not?

Well... I guess its possible. Drewe grimaces and says, Men are scum. A routine comic line of hers that doesnt sound so funny tonight.

So whats the plan? I ask lightly, falling into our usual banter.

More dictation. She stretches both arms above her head. My personal cross to bear. She begins gathering up the plates. Which reminds me. Tomorrow you face yours.

I feel a sudden chill. What are you talking about?

Take it easy, she says, giving me an odd look. I meant the biweekly burden. Sunday dinner with your in-laws.

She turns away and moves through the screen door, but my chill does not dissipate. Over her shoulder she says, Lately youve acted like its a trip to the dentist or something.

If only it were.

I rise from the porch and head for my office. Combined with the stress of the past weeks, the trip to New Orleans has exhausted me. After months of anxiety, I have finally done what I should have done long ago. For months Ive stayed up far too many hours and slept too few, lurking in Level Three in the hope of recognizing the error-free
transmissions of David Strobekker. But tonight I will sleep.

As I strip off my clothes, Drewes last comment echoes in my mind.
Lately youve acted like its a trip to the dentist or something.
In reality the trip to her parents house is a trip into a minefield. A place where one wrong word or too open glance could cause instant devastation. Drewe does not know this. Like the most dangerous mines, these were laid long ago by people who scarcely knew what they were doing. No maps exist, and disarming them is impossible. Once I thought it might be, but now I know the truth. When we seek to resurrect the past it eludes us; when we seek to elude the past, it reaches out with fingers that can destroy all we know and love.

Tonight I leave David Strobekker to the FBI.

I have my own demon.

Dear Father,

We landed near Virginia Beach at dusk, riding the scent of ocean to the earth.

We misdirected taxis to bring us within range of the patients house, then walked.

No EROS dalliances with this one. Shes a Navy girl, young and simple and tough. I was lucky to have Kali with me.

We entered while she showered, and what a specimen she was. Firm pink skin shining in the spray. For a moment I wished we were there for the old protocol.

But

After her scream died, I tried a little humor. Hello, Jenny, were from DonorNet. Ill bet you didnt think we made house calls.

She tried to fight us in the bedroom, making for a dresser (in which I later found a pistol). Kali brought her down with a knife slash to the thigh. Lots of blood, but essentially a superficial wound. It will have no effect on her role in the procedure.

Kali helped her dress, then forced her to give us her car keys. Jenny didnt whine or beg, like some. She was trying to think of a way out.

I drove her car to the airstrip, Kali guarding her in the backseat. At the plane Id planned to inject a mild sedative, but despite my reassurances the patient would not submit. I was forced to shoot her with a Ketamine dart. I also had to leave her car at the runway. Eventually it will be found. But there is
no record of our landing. No note. No trace of our passing. Another question mark for the police.

Kali has the controls now. My dark Shakti shepherds me through the stars. We hurtle into history at two hundred miles per hour. The patient lies bound behind us, silent as death, as blissfully unaware of the contribution she will make as the monkey that gave Salk his poliomyelitis vaccine.

Ive been thinking that I should present an edited version of these letters as an addendum to my official findings, or perhaps they belong with my curriculum vitae. Shocking to the unprepared mind, I suppose, but highly edifying for the medical historian.

But enough of that.

Things are where they are, and, as fate has willed,

So shall they be fulfilled.

Its that damned nigger contractor, says Bob Anderson.

Robert, not in front of Holly, scolds Margaret, his wife.

Bob Anderson is my father-in-law. He points across his Mexican tile patio toward a small girl child splashing in the shallow end of the swimming pool.

She cant hear me, Marg. And no matter how you cut it, it all comes back to that
nigger contractor
.

Patrick Graham, my brother-in-law, rolls his eyes at me while carefully making sure I am the only one who can see him. Patrick and I went to school together and are exactly the same age. An oncologist in Jackson, Mississippi, he is married to Erin, my wifes younger sister. His rolling eyes sum up a feeling too complex for words, one common to our generation of Southerners. They say,
We may not like it but theres nothing we can do about it except argue, and its not worth arguing about with our father-in-law because he wont ever change no matter what
.

It being racism, of course.

What are you jabbering about, Daddy? Drewe asks.

My wife is wearing a yellow sundress and standing over the wrought-iron table that holds the remains of the barbecued ribs we just devoured. Erin excluded, of course. My wifes sister is a strict vegetarian, which in Mississippi still rates up there with being a Hare Krishna. This get-together is a biweekly family ritual, Sunday dinner at the in-laws, who live twenty miles from Rain, on the outskirts of Yazoo City. We do it rain or shine, and today its shine: ninety-six degrees in the shade.

Dont get him started, honey, my mother-in-law says
wearily. Margaret Anderson has taken refuge from the heat beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.

Im talking about my new office, baby, Bob tells Drewe, ignoring Margaret.

Bob Anderson is a veterinarian and an institution in this part of the Delta. His practice thrives, but that is not what pays for the columned Greek Revival house that towers over the patio we are sitting on. In the last twenty years, Bob has invested with unerring instinct in every scheme that made any money in the Delta, most notably catfish farming. Money from all over the world pours into Mississippi in exchange for farm-raised catfishenough money to put the long-maligned catfish in the same league with cotton. A not insignificant portion of that money pours into Bob Andersons pockets. He is a short man but seems tall, even to those who have known him for years. Though he is balding, his forearms are thick and hairy. He walks with a self-assured, forward-leaning tilt, his chin cocked back with a military air. He is a natural hand with all things mechanical. Carpenter work, motors, welding, plumbing, a half dozen sports. Its easy to imagine him with one strong arm buried up to the shoulder in the womb of a mare, a wide grin on his sweaty face. Bob Anderson is a racist; he is also a good father, a faithful husband, and a dead shot with a rifle.

I took bids on my building, he says, looking back over his shirtless shoulder at Drewe. All the local boys made their plays, ocourse, first-class job like that. And all their bids were close to even. Then I get a bid from this nigger out of Jackson, name of Boyte. His bid was eight thousand less than the lowest of the local boys.

Did you take it? Patrick asks.

Erin GrahamPatricks wifeturns from her perch at poolside. She has been sitting with her tanned back to us, her long legs dangling in the water, watching her three-year-old daughter with an eagle eye. Erins dark eyes glower at her father, but Bob pretends not to notice.

Not yet, he says. See, the local boys somehow got wind of what the nigger bid

Somehow? Drewe echoes, expressing her suspicion
that her father told his cronies about their minority competition.

Anyhow, Bob plows on, it turns out the reason this nigger can afford to bid so low is that hes getting some kind of cheap money from the government. Some kind of
incentive
read handoutwhich naturally aint available to your white contractors. Now I ask you, is that fair? Im all for letting the nigger compete right alongside Jack and Nub, but for the government to use our tax money to help him undercut hardworking men like that

Are you sure the black contractors getting government help? Drewe asks.

Hell yes, Im sure. Nub told me himself.

So what are you going to do? asks Patrick, as if he really cares, which I know he does not.

What can I do? Bob says haplessly. Ive got to give it to the nigger, dont I?

DADDY, THAT IS ENOUGH!

Patrick and I look up, startled by the shrill voice. Erin has stood up beside the pool and she is pointing a long finger at her father. You may do and say as you wish at your house any time you wish
except
when my daughter is present. Holly will
not
grow up handicapped by the prejudices of this state.

Bob looks at Patrick and me and rolls his eyes, which from long experience we sons-in-law have no trouble translating as,
What do you expect from a girl who ran off to New York City when she turned eighteen and lived among Yankees?

Calm down, honey, Bob says. To you hes an African American. Five years ago he was black, before that a Negro, before that colored. How am I supposed to keep up? To me hes a nigger. His own friends call him nigger. Whats the difference? Holly wont remember any of this in five minutes anyway.

To be fair, Bob Anderson would never use this kind of language in mixed companymixed
racial
companyor in front of whites he did not know and feel comfortable with. Unless, of course, someone made him mad. To Bob Anderson, politically correct means you salute the flag, work your butt off, pay your taxes, pray in school, and
you by God
go
when Uncle Sam calls you, no questions asked. I could ridicule his views, but I wont. Guys like Bob Anderson fought and died for this country years before I was born. Guys like Bob Anderson liberated Nordhausen and Buchenwald. Bob himself fought in Korea. So I keep my thirty-three-year-old mouth shut.

But Erin doesnt. Goddamn it, Daddy, Im serious! she snaps, her tanned cheeks quivering. Hollys like a sponge and you know it!

Bobs face glows pink. He half rises from his reclining lawn chair. You hear that, Margaret? Your daughter just took the Lords name in vain, and shes on me for calling a spade a spade! I think any civilized person would agree that blasphemy is
far
worse than saying nigger now and again!

Margaret Anderson snores beneath her straw hat.

No its not, Daddy, Drewe says softly from the table. But youll never understand why.

I am enthralled by the continuing role reversal Erin and Drewe have been undergoing since they were kids. When they were teenagers, it was Drewe who almost daily pushed her father to the point that he locked her in her room or thrashed her with his belt. She constantly tested her limits, proving only that she was as stubborn as he was. Erin was a creature of equanimity, slipping through life with no resistance at all. Yet now that Erin is a mother, it is she who faces down Bob without fear or second thoughts.

As a child Drewe was a tomboy, curious, competitive, and tough. After puberty, she began to soften into a more feminine figure at the same time her intelligence put her at the top of her ninth-grade class. To prevent the inevitable taunts of being too good for everyone else, Drewe evolved a unique strategy. She became the wildest girl in the class. Or at least she seemed to. And one of her most convincing moves in this game of social survival was dating the wildest boy in her classme. And so it was that I alone knew her secret. While the other girls were perpetually awed by the craziness of some of the things Drewe did, I knew, for example, that on those
occasions when we managed to spend nearly all night together in bed, she stopped our passionate groping well short of going all the way. Yet she was perfectly content to let her friends think otherwise. And in the whirlwind of our relationship, no one seemed to notice that she maintained a 99.4 average in all subjects.

Erin was just as deceptive, but she took the opposite tack. A year behind Drewe, she effortlessly convinced every parent and teacher within thirty miles that she was a perfect angel while actually having sex with any guy who took her fancy, from clean-cut quarterbacks to pot-smoking cowboy rebels. Her grades were middling at best, but on the other hand, they were irrelevant.

Erins secret was her looks.

I gaze past Patrick and Bob: Erin has finally turned back toward the shimmering pool. I am now looking at what was once described as the finest ass in the state of Mississippi, and it still manages to make the one-piece bathing suit that covers it seem more revealing than a thong bikini. Even now, I am convinced that this thirty-two-year-old mother could give any high school senior a run for her money.

During 1979, Erin Andersons face appeared on the covers of six national magazines. Four days after she graduated from high school, she left Rain, Mississippi, for New York with five hundred dollars and the name of a modeling agent in her purse. Two months later she had signed a contract with the Ford agency. In quick succession came runway work, the six magazine covers, some TV spots. Then came a brief hiatus, and after that it was the inner pages of the magazines. Another hiatus, then mostly they used her hands, feet, breasts, and hair.

No tragic accident had disfigured her face. If looks alone were the criterion, Erin would still be gazing out from the racks at the supermarket checkout instead of gathering up her child from the shallow end of her parents swimming pool. Erins problems were inside her head, not outside.

But first the exterior. Where Drewe is fair, Erin is dark. I lay that at the feet of genetics. Bob Anderson came from Scots-English blood, Margaret Cajun French. Drewe got
her fathers genes, Erin her mothers. And the differences hold true right down the line. Drewes hair is thick, auburn, and slightly curly. Erins is fine and straight and so brown it is almost black. Drewes eyes are green and bright with quick intelligence; Erins are almond-shaped, as black and deep as smoldering Louisiana bottomland. Drew has a pert nose, while Erins is long and straight with catlike flared nostrils. And where Drewes lips are pink, like brush strokes on a Royal Doulton figurine, Erins are full and brown, her upper lip dusted with fine tawny down. Both girls are somewhere around five foot nine, but Erin is
long
.

I dont mean to shortchange my wife. Any man with functioning retinas would call Drewe a beauty. She is also demureexcept while workingand her strength and smarts give an edge to her elegance. She is a doctor, after all. Erin is a former model turned jet-set girlfriend turned housewife. But as I watch Erin leading her child by the hand to the wrought-iron table, the physical difference comes clear: Drewe is feminine; Erin is feline.

This is a difficult art, watching another woman without your wife noticing. You look with unrestricted freedom for the early part of your life, then suddenly you have to learn to conceal your interest. The battle is hopeless, like a physicist trying to train iron filings not to follow a magnet. But with Erin, I have had lots of practice.

Since I dated Drewe in high school, Erin and I were almost natural enemies. We constantly razzed each other, behaving as if related ourselves. I grew adept at ignoring her stunning legs as we hung around the pool in the summers. But sometimes ignoring her was impossible.

Once, at a high school lake party, some of the seniors got drunk enough to start skinny-dipping. Dusk was falling, and a few of the girls felt safe enough or bold enough to slip off their suits in the growing shadows and dive off the pier into the silver water.

When Drewe saw this, she silently stood up, threw her wild act to the winds, and started walking back toward the car. She obviously had no intention of stripping nude in front of strangers, no matter how drunk they might be. Besides, her coolness quotient was secure. She didnt look back at me, but I knew she expected me to follow.
And I meant to. But as I stood up, I heard a voice say softly: Harper.

I turned around to see Erin standing behind me. She wore the bottom half of a bikini, but her brown-nippled breasts were exposed. With her eyes locked on mine, she hooked a finger in the side of her suit and stepped lazily out of it.

She was glorious. And she knew it. I stood blinking in the dusk, trying to take in what I was seeing. Looking back now, I realize that trying to seetruly
see
a naked woman in her entirety is like trying to take in the carnage at a traffic accident. Your brain simply cannot process all the input being channeled like floodwater through your eyes. I saw bits of her: collarbones like sculpted braces inside a guitar, her flat brown oiled belly, beaded with pearls of lake water descending to a stark tan line where a lighter brownness descended again to the rough black triangle blurring the wide cleft between her thighs. And always her eyes. How long did I stare? Five seconds? Ten? I heard a long, reverent whistle from the water below the pier. Then Erins gaze floated above my shoulder and she simply stepped off the pier and dropped into the lake. When I turned around and looked up to the house, I saw no one. But after I reached the car, Drewe remained silent all the way back to Rain.

Uncle
Harrrrp

Startled, I look away from Erin and into the face of Holly, her daughter. What is it, punkin?

Wheres your
git
-tar?

Bob chuckles.

I didnt bring it today.

Play me a
sawng
, commands the three-year-old.